About the Book:
Erica Bauermeister, the national bestselling author of The
School of Essential Ingredients, presents a moving and evocative
coming-of-age novel about childhood stories, families lost and found, and how a
fragrance conjures memories capable of shaping the course of our lives.
Emmeline lives an enchanted childhood on a remote island
with her father, who teaches her about the natural world through her senses.
What he won’t explain are the mysterious scents stored in the drawers that line
the walls of their cabin, or the origin of the machine that creates them.
As Emmeline grows, however, so too does her curiosity, until one day the
unforeseen happens, and Emmeline is vaulted out into the real world--a place of
love, betrayal, ambition, and revenge. To understand her past, Emmeline must
unlock the clues to her identity, a quest that challenges the limits of her
heart and imagination.
Lyrical and immersive, The Scent Keeper explores the
provocative beauty of scent, the way it can reveal hidden truths, lead us to
the person we seek, and even help us find our way back home.
Buy Links:
About the Author:
Erica Bauermeister is the author of the bestselling novel The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy for Beginners, and The Lost Art of Mixing. She is also the co-author of the non-fiction works, 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide and Let’s Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Washington, and has taught there and at Antioch University. She is a founding member of the Seattle7Writers and currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
Q&A With the Author:
1. How did you do the research for the scents in the
book?
I’ve been reading about fragrances and the sense of smell
for probably ten years, ever since I wrote a character who was a
fragrance-matcher in Joy For Beginners. I am fascinated by
the subliminal power of smell. I read everything from Diane Ackerman’s
wondrous Natural History of the Senses to Mandy Aftel’s Essence
and Alchemy, Patrick Suskind’s amazing novel Perfume: The Story of
a Murderer, articles and the strange and intriguing work of Sissal Tolas,
and memoirs like Alyssa Harad’s Coming to My Senses. Then I
bought a whole range of individual scents and started to learn them. I
would wear one scent each day, watching for how it changed my mood, trying to
figure out adjectives to describe it, and the stories that lived inside.
Then I thought about how they would get along. It was a fabulous
experience all around.
2. Could there be a follow-up to this story?
I
never say never, but at this point Emmeline seems happy with her story.
If she starts talking again, however, I’ll always listen.
3. At what age did you know you wanted to write?
At the point when I realized that authors got to live in the
world of the book the whole time they were writing it. That felt like
magic, and I wanted to be there.
MY REVIEW:
The Scent Keeper by Erica BauermeisterStory starts out with a little girl and she's with her father on the island.
She sometimes wishes for things and they arrive in a black box that her father carries to the cabin they live in.
He has made little cubbyholes for each bottle of scents. He keeps papers on them all. Each one is different.
She learns and the goat helps her to investigate the island. Bad things happen, a bear and then before she knows it she's living with a man and a woman.
She will have to learn things how others learn them, in school. She's now a teen and everything is still foreign to her.
She has a knack of smelling things and they tell her how a person is going to act.
Nightingale was not only her dads invention but it would take a picture and keep the scent also.
Everything she had ever been told was not true and she learns she has other relatives that were looking for her.
She likes Fletcher who helps at the resort in the summer months and they attend school together. They talk the same language/hand signals.
Love the time she spends with her mother and learning more about scents-priceless! Acknowledgements included at the end.
Love to read more from this author-so very descriptive details. I felt as if I was there.
SO much to this book!
A KEEPER!
Received this review copy from St. Martin's Press via Netgalley and this is my honest opinion.
#NetGalley
EXCERPT CHAPTER 1
THE SCENT KEEPER Blog Tour
Back before
there was time, I lived with my father on an island, tucked away in an endless
archipelago that reached up out of the cold salt water, hungry for air. Growing
up in the midst of the rain and moss and ancient thick-barked trees, it was
easy to forget that the vast majority of our island was underwater—descending
down two, three, five hundred bone-chilling feet. Forever really, for you could
never hold your breath long enough to get to the bottom.
Those islands were a place to run away, although I didn’t understand that
at the time. I had nothing to run from and every reason to stay. My father was
everything. I’ve heard people say that someone is their “whole world,” their
eyes filled with stars. But my father was my world, in a way so literal it can
still grab my thoughts, pick them up, and toss them around like driftwood in a
storm.
Our cabin was set in a clearing at the center of the island. We were not
the first to live there—those islands have a long history of runaways. Almost a
century ago there were French fur trappers, with accents that lilted and
danced. Loggers with mountainous shoulders, and fishermen who chased
silver-backed salmon. Later came the draft dodgers, hiding from war. Hippies,
dodging rules. The islands took them all in—the storms and the long, dark
winters spat most out again. The beauty there was raw; it could kill as easily
as it could astonish.
Our cabin had been built by the truest of runaways. He set up in a place
where no one could find him and built his home from trees he felled himself. He
spent forty years on the island, clearing space for a garden and planting an
orchard. One autumn, however, he simply disappeared. Drowned, it was said.
After that the cabin was empty for years until we arrived and found the apple
trees, opened the door. Raised the population of the island to two.
I don’t remember arriving on the island myself; I was too young. I only
remember living there. I remember the paths that wandered through those
watchful trees, the odor of the dirt beneath our feet, as dark and complicated
as fairy tales. I remember our one-room cabin, the big chair by the woodstove,
and our collection of stories and science books. I remember the smell of wood
smoke and pine pitch in my father’s beard as he read to me at night, and the
ghostly aroma of the runaway’s pipe tobacco, an olfactory reminder that had
sunk into the walls and never quite disappeared. I remember the way the rain
seemed to talk to the roof as I fell asleep, and how the fire would snap and
tell it to be quiet.
Most of all, I remember the drawers.
My father had begun building them when we moved into the cabin, and when
he was done they lined our walls from floor to ceiling. The drawers were small
things, their polished wooden fronts no bigger than my child-sized hands. They
surrounded us like the forest and islands outside our door.
Each drawer contained a single small bottle, and inside each bottle was a
piece of paper, rolled around itself like a secret. The glass stoppers of the
bottles were sealed with different colored waxes—red in the top rows, green for
those below. My father almost never opened the bottles.
“We need to keep them safe,” he said.
But I could hear the papers whispering inside the drawers.
Come find me.
“Please?” I’d ask, again and again.
Finally, he agreed. He took out a leather book filled with numbers and
carefully added one to the list. Then he turned to the wall of drawers,
pondering his choice.
“Up there,” I said, pointing up high to where the red-wax bottles lived.
Stories always begin at the top of a page.
My father had built a ladder that slid along the wall, and I watched him
climb it almost to the ceiling, reaching into a drawer and drawing out its
bottle. When he was back on the ground, he carefully broke the seal. I could
hear glass scritching against glass as he pulled out the stopper, then the
rustle of the paper as he unrolled it into a plain, white square. He leaned in
close, inhaling, then wrote another number in the book.
I meant to stay still, but I leaned forward, too. My father looked up and
smiled, holding out the paper.
“Here,” he said. “Breathe in, but not too much. Let the smell introduce
itself.”
I did as he said. I kept my chest tight and my breath shallow. I could
feel the tendrils of a fragrance tickling the inside of my nose, slipping into
the curls of my black hair. I could smell campfires made from a wood I didn’t
recognize; dirt more parched than any I had ever known; moisture, ready to
burst from clouds in a sky I’d never seen. It smelled like waiting.
“Now, breathe in deeply,” my father said.
I inhaled, and fell into the fragrance like Alice down the rabbit hole.
- - -
Later, after the bottle had been stoppered and sealed and put back in its
drawer, I turned to my father. I could still smell the last of the fragrance
lingering in the air.
“Tell me its story,” I asked him. “Please.”
“All right, little lark,” he said. He sat in the big chair and I nestled
in next to him. The fire crackled in the woodstove; the world outside was
still.
“Once upon a time, Emmeline . . .” he began, and his voice rolled around
the rhyme of it as if the words were made of chocolate.
Once upon a time, Emmeline, there
was a beautiful queen who was trapped in a great white castle. None of the big,
bold knights could save her. “Bring me a smell that will break the walls,” she
asked a brave young boy named Jack . . .
I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in
the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.
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